On Monday I organised meetings in Amsterdam for Robert Aliber, an economics professor and co-author of
"Manias, Panics, and Crashes", a famous book that originally was written by Charles Kindleberger. We spent the whole morning at the Dutch central bank, where he gave a lecture and had bilateral discussions, and where we had a concluding lunch. After lunch he was interviewed, and then we went to the Rijksmuseum.
My English is limited and mostly related to work. Since 1979 English has been my working language, together with Spanish and Dutch. So here we were standing in the Rijksmuseum in front of an old Dutch painting of impressive men (were they soldiers?) and suddenly I saw a little dog between their legs.
'The little dog is very vividly painted,' I said to Robert or Bob Aliber.
'Yes,' he said, nodding with his head (did he really do so?).
'It looks at us,' I said,
'Yes,' he said, looking at the eyes of the dog that were very well painted.
'The vividness of the dog is emphasised by his moisty nose,' I said, wondering whether 'moisty' was the correct word. 'Is moisty the word you use in English?' I asked.
'Yes,' said Bob, with a smile.
I just checked it on internet and discovered that it is a 'moist' nose, not moisty nose.